Her garden—yes it was hers! Changed and yet not changed, even more hers, it seemed to her, now, than had been the weed grown, tangled desert she remembered. Yet she remembered that she had seen it thus in dreams and now, as the sun rose, as the sky was flooded with the glory of the dawn, she saw her garden in all its beauty, in all its reality, as sometimes she had seen it in those strange dreams that had come to her.
Had she not seen it like this when those figures, those strange, beautiful, unreal figures of her imagination had promenaded these old walks, those gracious ladies with their strange old world costumes, their hair dressed so high on their heads, their tiny slim waists, their great bell-like skirts and their little red heeled shoes. Those men in their rich deep skirted coats, their stockinged legs, their swords, their wigs—all those visions that had come to her in dreams, had they not moved and lived in a garden like this, this same garden as it was now, all trim and sweet and gay with flowers?
She felt her heart pounding, throbbing, beating as it had never beat before. She hurried on and on, down the broad stone pathway to the lake and there she saw her little friend, just the same as always, the broken pitcher on her shoulder.
So while the sun rose higher and higher, Betty stood there and nodded solemnly to the little stone figure, who never nodded back. And then, turning to go back to the house before the others should know that she had come here unpermitted, she stopped suddenly and uttered a little choking cry of wonder and amazement. For from here she could see the house, a place of the living, no longer a place of the dead. She could see the curtains fluttering in the breeze at the many open windows, she could see the signs of life there, the primness and neatness of it all!
And it was all familiar, there was no strangeness to her here, she was looking at that which her eyes had seen before and yet how could it be, since she had not entered this place, since those days before the workmen had come to alter it all? How could it be? and yet it was! And then suddenly she turned and did not know why, and looked at an old stone seat that stood on the edge of the great ring about the sundial. Why had she looked at it? What had she expected to see there? What she saw was an old, old stone seat, grey and brown and green in the shadows, golden white where the sun’s rays touched it.